Johnson and Johnson has recently found itself in the midst of controversy surrounding recalls of certain medications, namely Tylenol and Children’s Motrin, among others. In April of this year, 43 types of over the counted children's medication was recalled due to "manufacturing deficiencies". This essentially referred to foreign particles or "manufacturing residue" ending up in the final product. Over 100,000 bottles of medicine were recalled.

While this event itself is nothing new, especially considering the string of recalls on everything from spinach to baby toys and formula, there is a twist to Johnson and Johnson’s story. In addition to the April recall, there was, according to myfoxny.com, another recall of Motrin back in June 2009. But rather than inform the public, Johnson and Johnson “hired a subcontractor to quietly purchase thousands of Motrin tablets without notifying the public of a potential problem. The question now is whether another similar and much larger phantom recall was also carried out involving Children's Tylenol.”

This story has been out for well over a week, and no one seems concerned that the company didn’t tell the public about this recall. Instead, they decide to pay someone (the name of the subcontractor is unknown to me) to buy their defective products. While the bottom line is that the product is taken off the shelves, why pay someone to buy it?

I like the Johnson and Johnson name; their products are usually of good quality and the name has been around practically since the beginning of time. But if they want to tout themselves as “a family company”, it seems they would look out for their consumers a bit more. Maybe they didn’t want to tarnish their reputation and name in a recall scandal, but there have been so many recalls lately, one more could hardly be called a scandal. They would have been better off just coming out and telling people not to buy the medicine, taking whatever profit loss came with it.